The Saint in Action (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  There was a certain pregnant interval of silence while Peter brought the car out of the Park and squeezed it through the tide of traffic swirling around Hyde Park Corner.

  “I always thought you were daft,” he said, as they floated out of the maelstrom into the calmer waters of Grosvenor Place. “And now I know it.”

  “But why?” asked the Saint reasonably. “Comrade Quintana seems to have been quite a pal of Ingleston’s, so he ought to be interested in the news about his boy friend. Or if he’s already heard it, he’ll want someone to condole with him in his bereavement. But if he has heard it, I should be interested to know how—I sent for all the evening papers, and there wasn’t a line about the murder in any of them.”

  “Why shouldn’t he have heard about it from the police?”

  “He might have. And yet somehow I don’t think so. I stuck that photograph right under Teal’s bloodhound nose, and he was too busy boiling with thwarted rage because I’d accounted for knowing the name of the corpse to be able to smell a clue when he’d got one. Of course, he may have done some more sniffing since then, but even then it may take him some time to realise who Luis Quintana is. And anyway we’ve got to chance it, because Quintana’s our own best clue…You can stop the car here, Peter—I won’t drive up to the door.”

  “What’s making you so modest all of a sudden?” Peter inquired innocently as he applied the brakes.

  The Saint smiled, and stepped out on to the pavement.

  “It comes naturally to me,” he said. “And this isn’t going to be an official visit.”

  “I’ll bet you don’t even know what sort of a visit it is going to be,” said Peter accusingly, and Simon grinned at him without shame.

  “I don’t—which only makes it more interesting. Wait for me here, old lad, and I’ll tell you all about it later.”

  He was only confessing the simple truth, but in the way he looked at it there was nothing about it to depress the spirits. The Saint had always been like that—daft, as Peter had called him, but daft with a magnificent insolence of daftness that had driven more than one of his adversaries to desperation as they essayed the hopeless task of predicting his unpredictable impulses. Having nothing to make plans for, the Saint had seen no reason to expend his energy on making them, particularly when so much of it would have been spent on meeting hypothetical difficulties while the real ones were probably never thought of. He had obtained Quintana’s address from a friend on a newspaper, and all he knew about it was that it was number 319 in the square. He had no idea what type of house it was, and on that depended the development of his campaign. On that, and on whatever other schemes crossed his mind on the way.

  He sauntered along the south side of the square, assimilating numbers and opening his mind impartially to the free influx of inspiration. Number 319, he discovered, stood in the very southeast corner of the square, at the right-angle junction of the two streets that entered the square at that point. It was a broad two-storied house of vaguely Georgian architecture, flanked by the wings of wall common to that type of façade which apparently screened a small surrounding garden. Across the front, an entrance driveway ran in past the front door under a pillared portico. And as the Saint stood on the corner, lighting a cigarette and taking in every detail of the building with the trained eye of a veteran, a taxi turned into the drive and coughed itself to a standstill under the porch. Simon moved a little so that he could see between the pillars, and for one moment only he saw the passenger who got out of the cab, as he paid off the driver before he turned and went up the steps through the front door, which had been opened for him as soon as the taxi pulled up.

  For one moment only—but that was enough to make the Saint catch his breath so quickly that the lighter in his hand went out. For the man who had gone in, the man whose face he had seen for that paralysing instant, was Ladek Urivetzky, the supreme forger of the twentieth century, the man who was reported to have been eliminated by a firing-squad in Oviedo four weeks ago.

  6

  Simon had no doubt of it. He had never met Urivetzky in person, but his memory for faces was as accurate as a card index, and his private collection of photographs and descriptions of outstanding members of the international underworld contained items that would have been envied by more than one official bureau of records. And that sallow, thick-lipped, skull-like face with the curved scar under the left eye was as unmistakable as any face could be without previous first-hand examination.

  For some seconds the Saint stood motionless, while the door closed and the empty taxi rattled on out of the driveway and departed into the night. Then he moved on, with a tremor of exquisite excitement tugging at his nerves.

  He made a complete circuit of the block in which the house stood. It was quite a small block, and the rest of the buildings in it consisted of the ordinary, monotonously identical, tall, narrow houses common to that part of London. Built in an unbroken row one against the other, they formed a solid three-sided wall with no openings other than a couple of narrow alleys in one side which led into little courtyards of mews garages buried in the heart of the block. Nowhere did the place seem less effectively protected than it did at the front.

  Standing once more on the corner from which he had started off, the Saint drew his cigarette to brightness and studied the façade again with that tingle of reckless ecstasy working its way deep into the profoundest recesses of his being.

  Somehow or other he had to get into Quintana’s house, and if the only way to get in was at the front, then he would get in at the front. Not that the front door entered into his plans—

  Any vague idea he might have set out with of brazenly bluffing his way into the owner’s presence had been annihilated beyond resurrection by that one breath-stopping glimpse of Urivetzky’s arrival. The brazenness and the bluff might come later, and probably would, but before that the Saint wanted to know what a man who was supposed to be dead was doing at the house of a man whose friend really was dead, and why a man who was admitted to have been the greatest forger of his time was visiting the friend of a man who had had an unaccountable collection of bonds which might have been forged, and why one thread in the lives of all these strangely assorted people linked them together, when that thread had its roots in a country where death had lately become a commonplace—and the Saint wanted to know all these things without announcing his intrusion. Wherefore he stood and dissected the possibilities with that stir of lawless delight roaming through his insides. On each side of the house, the ground floor was wider than the upper part of the buildings, so that its flat roof formed a kind of terrace on to which upstairs windows opened. And beyond the garden wall there were two tall trees, growing so close to the side of the house that it looked as if one could step off one of their branches on to the terrace as easily as stepping across a garden path…

  The Saint crossed the road.

  He had no qualms about the enormity of what he proposed to do. What occupied his mind much more were the chances of being allowed to commit his crime. There seemed to be an entirely unnecessary number of street lamps clustered around that corner, and while they could never have competed with the noonday sun, they were bright enough to illumine the scene for the eyes of any passer-by, who might tend to regard the sight of a man climbing over a wall as a spectacle to which the attention of the neighbourhood might justifiably be directed. But Cambridge Square is a quiet place, and at that hour it was sunk in its regular post-prandial coma. The Saint slowed his steps to allow a lone prowling taxi to drag itself past him, and at the same time he measured the wall with his eye. It was not more than seven feet high, and the top was protected with curved iron spikes set in the brickwork—but they were spikes of an old-fashioned pattern which had been clearly designed for a day when burglarious agility was still an undeveloped art. To a wall-climber of the Saint’s experience, they were not much more of an obstacle than a row of feathers…

  The prowling taxi had hauled itself wearily on, and the near
est other car was the limousine in which Peter Quentin was waiting. For the moment, there was no other human being nearer than that. Simon Templar’s glance swept once over the panorama, and he knew that it was no use waiting for a better opportunity. The rest was on the lap of the gods.

  He made a leap for the top of the wall, caught the base of one spike with his right hand and the curve of another with his left, and was over like a flash of dark lightning. A roving cat could hardly have cleared the obstacle with more silent speed.

  His feet padded down with the same catlike softness on the paved path on the other side, and for a second he crouched there without movement, exactly as he had landed, listening for any trace of a disturbing sound in the world outside. But his straining ears caught nothing that stood out from the vague normal background of London noise, and in another moment he was darting across an open patch of grass like a fleeting shadow to the foot of one of the trees he had marked down in his survey.

  Its branches grew so low down that his hands could reach the lowest of them with the help of an easy jump, and with only a moment’s pause he was working himself up into the short young foliage with the swift suppleness of a trained gymnast. In less than a minute from the time when he had surmounted the wall, he was poising himself for the short leap on to the terrace that was his first objective.

  Until then, he had been screened by the wall and the new leaves that partly clothed the tree, but now he was in the open again, plainly visible to anyone who looked up or looked out, even when he had crossed the terrace to the partial shelter of one of the dark window-doorways that opened on to it. He tried the handle cautiously, but it was fastened on the inside. For some time, which was probably a minute or two, but which seemed like a week, he had to work on it with a slender tool which he took from his pocket, before the window opened and let him into the dark room beyond.

  He closed the window after him and stood looking out through it, scanning the square below. Beside the limousine near the corner he saw a dark shape pacing to and fro, and saw also the erratically fluctuating pin-point of a lighted cigarette-end, and the sketch of a smile touched his lips. Peter was doubtless collecting enough material to give a heart specialist a year’s course of study, but there was the consoling thought that a few more repetitions of the same stimulus would probably give him a lifelong immunity of incalculable value…Otherwise, there were no visible signs of commotion. If any stray wanderers in the vicinity had witnessed any excerpts from the recent unrolling of events, they had apparently decided that such affairs were none of their dull and respectable business, and had proceeded untroubled on their prosaic ways.

  The Saint turned away from the window and unclipped the pencil flashlight from his breast pocket. Its dim, subdued gleam swivelled once round the room—and snapped out again suddenly.

  He was in some kind of formal reception-room, a gaunt, bare chamber with gilt-edged mirrors and velvet drapes and stuffy uninviting chairs ranged around the walls to leave most of the floor clear. There was nothing remarkable about it except its monumental ugliness, which would have impressed the spiritual descendants of Queen Victoria as being delightfully respectable and dignified. Facing the Saint, as he stood by the window, was a door which presumably led out to a landing or corridor, and on his right was another door communicating with an adjoining room. It was through this communicating door that he had heard the sound of voices which had made him extinguish his torch with involuntary abruptness.

  He had heard the answer to a muffled question quite distinctly, spoken in good English but with a strong foreign accent:

  “I met him in Sevilla when he was visiting Jerez for his company.”

  A slow smile of deep contentment touched the Saint’s lips, and he put his torch away with an inaudible sigh. If he had known all the inside geography of the house and had moreover been gifted with second sight, he couldn’t have organised his entrance more accurately and appropriately. It was one of those moments when his guardian angel seemed to have hooked him bodily on to the assembly line of adventure and launched him on to an unerringly triumphant sequence of developments like the routine of some supernal mass-production factory.

  In a few swift, noiseless steps he was at the door, with his ear close to the panels, in time to hear the first thin grumbling voice say, “In a case like this, you should have more sense. You say you work for what you think is good for your country, but you are as stupid as a little child. I am only working for money for myself, but even I am more careful. Or is that the reason why I cannot afford to be stupid?”

  “My dear Urivetzky!” The second voice was conciliatory. “It was not so easy as you think. We had to find agents quickly, and at a time when we could take no risks, when everything had to be done in secret, when, if we made a mistake, we could have been imprisoned or even executed. Ingleston had many friends in Sevilla, expropriated aristocrats, and they assured me that he was in sympathy with our cause. I heard the highest recommendations of him before I spoke to him, and we wished to use foreigners whenever possible because they would arouse no suspicion. But every man can be tempted—”

  “It is the business of a leader to choose men who are difficult to tempt,” Urivetzky retorted sourly. “Anyone who was not stupid would know that when you entrust a man with bearer bonds which are not traceable, which can be used for any purpose by the man who possesses them, that you must take care how you choose him.”

  “I am not so experienced in these matters as yourself.” The other’s voice had an edge to it. “Unfortunately all the gold of Spain is held by the Banco de España, in Madrid, which is held by the Reds, and we shall never know what they have done with it. I regret the necessity for these tricks, but we have no choice.”

  “Pah! You have choice enough. How many thousand Germans and Italians are fighting on your side?”

  “They are in sympathy with us, but even they would not help us for nothing.” Urivetzky grunted.

  “I also regret your necessities, if they are necessities,” he said. “And I shall regret them more if your other agents have been as badly chosen.”

  “They have not been badly chosen. At this moment I have nearly forty thousand pounds in American and English money in my safe, all of it paid over to me by our other agents. Ingleston was the only mistake we have made.”

  “And he won’t trouble us anymore,” said a third voice, speaking for the first time.

  It was a moment after the Saint had decided that it was time for him to locate the keyhole and add another dimension to the drama which was being unfolded for his benefit. He found the hole just as the third voice reached his ears, and scanned the scene through it with some interest.

  The room beyond was smaller than the one which he was in, and from the more habitable furnishings and the lines of bookshelves along the walls it appeared to be a small private study.

  Urivetzky sat in an arm-chair with his back to the keyhole—the hairless cranium which showed over the back of the chair could only have belonged to him. In a swivel chair behind the desk sat another man whom the Saint recognised at once from the photograph he had seen as Luis Quintana himself: he was smiling at the time, exposing the characteristic Spanish row of irregular fangs covered with greenish-yellow slime, like rocks left naked at low tide, which ought to be exhibited in museums for the education of Anglo-Saxon maidens who have been misled by ceaseless propaganda into believing in the dentifricial glamour of the Latin grin.

  Simon observed those details with his first perfunctory glance. From a curiosity point of view, he was more immediately interested in the third member of the party, who sat puffing a cigar in the chair directly facing him. He was a man with a square-looking body and a close-cropped square-looking grey head; the expression of his mouth was hidden by a thick straggling moustache, but his black eyes were flat and vicious. And the Saint knew intuitively that he must be the unidentified assassin whom for the purposes of convenient reference he had christened Pongo.

  “The oth
er bonds have not yet been found,” Urivetzky said acidly.

  “They will be found,” Quintana reassured him.

  “They had better be found. Otherwise this will be the finish. I am not interested in your country, but I am interested in my living.”

  The Rebels’ Representative raised his eyebrows.

  “Perhaps you exaggerate. If these forgeries are so perfect—”

  “Of course they are perfect. No man in the world could have done better. But they are forgeries. Why are you so stupid? A bond is a work of art. To those who have eyes, it has the signature of the creator in every line. So is a forgery a work of art. Look at a connoisseur in an art gallery. Without any catalogue, he will study the pictures and he will say, ‘That is a Velasquez, that is a Rembrandt, that is an El Greco.’ So there are men in the world who will look at forgeries of bonds, and say, ‘That is a So-and-so, that is a Somebody, that is a Urivetzky.’ It makes no difference if the Urivetzky is most like the original. There are still men who will recognise it.”

  “It is hardly likely to fall into their hands. And it was to disarm their suspicion that we had the story sent out that you had been killed.”

  “And so perhaps you make more suspicion. This man Templar is not a fool—I have heard too much of him.”

  “He will be taken care of also,” said the man known as Pongo. “I have been working all day—”

  He was interrupted by a knock on the door. A servant came in as Quintana answered, and turned towards the eliminator of problems.

  “There is someone to speak to you on the telephone, Señor,” he said. The square man gestured smugly at Urivetzky.

  “You see?” he said. “Perhaps this is the report I’ve been waiting for.”

  He got up and went out, and the Saint straightened the kinks out of his neck and spine. He had done as good a job of eavesdropping as he could have hoped to do, and he had no complaints. Nearly all the questions in his mind had been answered.